Amazing Alumna, April 2015

“YPT gives you some really amazing opportunities.”

The Student Advisory Council has a new resident satirist, and her name is Eva Sirotic. The quick-witted ninth grader at Washington-Lee High School is not afraid to tell it like it is, and her deft humor has helped establish her as one of YPT’s most promising young alumni.

Eva first got involved with our work last year, as an eighth grader at Swanson Middle School. “I thought [the In-School Playwriting Program] was just going to be another boring workshop...[but] it was pretty cool. They gave me a good basis to write.”

And write Eva did—a twenty-page play called HOW TO KILL YOUR EVIL DEMON LIBRARIAN..., which was selected as a Featured Play in the 2014 New Play Festival. The play is rife with subtle jokes and pop culture references, including an impressive sequence involving the book The Chronicles of Flarnia, which pokes fun at Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all at once.

After the Festival, Eva was invited to join our Student Advisory Council, a committee made up of YPT alumni that advises our organization. “It’s nice here—it’s very welcoming,” Eva says of the Council. “YPT gives you some really amazing opportunities, which I think is really cool.”

One of those opportunities was a recent trip to the White House, where members of the Council attended a poetry workshop and then got the chance to see Barack and Michelle Obama speak, up close and personal. “I was crying, the girl next to me was crying...it was very surreal to see the President ten feet from me,” she remembers with a smile.

Nowadays, though, Eva doesn’t have time to sit and reminisce about meeting the First Family—she and the Council are busy preparing for Stage Fright, an original play they wrote and will perform at Busboys and Poets on May 6. For the play, Eva once again sharpened her satirist’s tongue with a piece called The I-Pocalypse, “which is about destruction after the iPhone comes out.” Never one to pass up the chance for a pun, Eva ends her play thus: “There is a war coming. And it’s going to be SIRI-ous.”

We are SIRI-ously happy to have Eva as a member of the Council, and look forward to working with her for years to come!

See Eva Sirotic and the Student Advisory Council onstage in Stage Fright, Wednesday, May 6 at 7pm at Busboys and Poets! Free!